This Has to End! Obamacare Still Forces Americans to Fund Abortions!

It’s health insurance open enrollment time. Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), more colloquially known as Obamacare, Americans everywhere have seen the costs spiral alarmingly upward, and the services spiral downward in a similar fashion. Many promises were made by the administration, including keeping the doctor of your choice, and many others, pretty much all of which were ultimately revealed to be pipe dreams.

One pesky detail they deliberately buried was a provision that included the ability of insurers to add a surcharge for…wait for it…ABORTION! It was originally written in such a way that the abortion provision surcharge was plainly visible to the purchaser. The Obama administration, however, reinterpreted the language in such a way that it enabled insurers to bury the cost inside the fine print and obscured from the buyers, many of whom paid extra for something in which they have absolutely NO desire to participate.

It’s time again for Americans shopping for health insurance on ObamaCare exchanges to sign up or renew their coverage. As was the case last year, too many Americans are at risk of signing up for plans that contain a hidden abortion surcharge for abortion on demand, unless the Trump administration acts now.

ObamaCare was the largest expansion of taxpayer-funded abortion since Roe v. Wade, dramatically increasing abortion funding by allowing subsidies for plans that cover elective abortion.

This goes against the consensus of the strong majority of Americans who oppose taxpayer funding of abortion, as well as the very letter of the Hyde Amendment, longstanding federal policy that has saved more than two million lives by preventing taxpayer dollars from being used for this purpose.

The Obama administration convinced “pro-life” Democrats in Congress to go along with this scheme by proposing a Trojan horse compromise: the promise of an executive order restating an accounting gimmick embedded in ObamaCare that required a separate abortion surcharge every month for customers whose plan included abortion coverage.

Then, once the ink was dry, the Obama administration unilaterally interpreted “separate” to mean “together” and permitted insurers to bury the surcharge in their plan documents instead of collecting separate payments transparently, as the law requires.

In practical terms, this means that in 2018, taxpayer-funded ObamaCare plans in 24 states and the District of Columbia covered abortion on demand. In 10 of those states, more than 85 percent of ObamaCare plans covered abortion on demand, including seven states where every single ObamaCare plan for individuals and families covered elective abortion. It’s much harder, if not impossible to quantify the human cost of innocent lives snuffed out that otherwise might have been spared, and the complicity ObamaCare puts on unsuspecting taxpayers.

It’s up to Congress to come up with a long-term fix for ObamaCare’s radical abortion expansion. At a minimum, though, insurers should have to follow the law as written.

To that end, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Seema Verma proposed a rule in November 2018 to correctly interpret statutory language and require the abortion surcharge to be collected separately, but that was almost a year ago.

Then this past summer, 25 senators and 103 members of the House led by Reps. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) and Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) sent a letter urging the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to quickly finalize the new rule.

HHS and CMS have now done everything they can, and the rule rests with Russell Vought, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), who needs to finalize it.

If I were still in the market for health insurance in this way and found out that my plan had such a charge buried in it, I would be extremely angry at the insurer for their underhanded way of socking it to me with a charge for a procedure that I absolutely despise.

I’ve said it many times, and I expect to say it many more times. Until abortion is abolished, I intend to continue to confront proponents with the fact that it is nothing less than premeditated first-degree murder for hire. It is a criminal offense of the worst kind. It deserves the harshest of penalties. Tens of millions of our progeny have been killed due to the despicable practice.

The black community alone has lost approximately 20 million souls. That doesn’t account for the ones who would be old enough by now to have children or grandchildren of their own.

Just one life is valuable beyond measure, and there is no scale big enough for anyone to determine what those lives that were snuffed out could have contributed to the rest of humanity. Abortion must be stopped, and the insurers must be held to the letter of the law and stop hiding the surcharges from the unsuspecting customer.